Poetry is when a poet puts on a crown of an inventor
□ Ding Dongya and Lei Pingyang
Ding Dongya (hereinafter referred to as "Ding"):
Hello Teacher Lei Pingyang! During this time, you can learn more about yourself and your poetry by reading your three collections of poems, "Sending Water", "Mount Kino" and "Repairing the Lamp", as well as some of your recent new works and previous reviews and interviews about your poetry. You were born in Zhaotong, Yunnan, Yunnan is the meaning of "the south of the clouds", the Warring States period is the resting place of the Dian tribes, the history and culture is long, the natural scenery is more gorgeous and charming, the three rivers flowing together, the stone forest, the Hani terraces, the dali ancient city, the three pagodas of chongsheng Temple, the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, the Erhai Sea, the Fuxian Lake, etc., are undoubtedly desirable. In 2010, your poetry collection "Yunnan Chronicle" won the fifth Lu Xun Literature Award, the title and content of the book are naturally closely related to Yunnan, as Lu Award commented, you "walked through the land of Yunnan, felt in the life course of your fathers and fellow countrymen, traveled back and forth between the real land and the historical starry sky, creating a magical, dignified, deep poetic sky, and the spirit flowing through it transcended regional restrictions." What does yunnan look like in your mind?
Lei Pingyang (hereinafter referred to as "Lei"):
When I first went to Xishuangbanna in the early 1990s, I was quickly fascinated by its colors, sounds, people's appearance, and the appearance of its plants—for me, it was real but also fictional, and there were no imaginary boundaries to be found. It was also during that time period that I also went to Dali, Lijiang, Diqing, Nujiang and Lincang. The ancient city-state under the Diancang Mountains, with its heterotopia texture, makes me think that Dali is not only the "landscape bonsai" of the Creator, but also a cultural special zone it has given to mankind, and a shining two-way corridor may exist in a stream, with one end connected to the world and the other leading to heaven. Lijiang and Diqing, I see them as a place where people and gods live together, every moment of daily life, you can look up and see the holy snowy mountains, and from everyone's eyes you can see that some of the light may belong to the gods - they live in their hearts. In Cing Zhong Luo in Nu Jiang Prefecture, I once wrote a short poem: "In C Zhong Luo, I want to have a house / Built at the foot of a snowy mountain with prayer flags / In C Zhong Luo, I also want to have a / grave with a cross / The water of the Nu River flows from the flat tombstone."
The above areas are a part of Yunnan. When many parts with "heterogeneity" and divinity are combined into a "province", Yunnan is tantamount to a dream kingdom named after heaven. What fascinates me most about Yunnan, however, is the independent and extremely compatible ancient civilization created by its many ethnic groups. Yes, all things have spirits, and all things have human souls. Does this mean being left behind? Meaning that the world belongs to someone else and we live in the shadows? Not really.
I've been calling for the next building in Yunnan— it should be the "Yunnan Epic Museum," because I've never seen a place like Yunnan that has so many creation, heroic, and migration epics, and the language of this epic is not Chinese, but Dai, Guyi, Dongba, Miao, and Bai without writing, and so on. I have spoken breathlessly at seminars and discussions: If one day a room of 10,000 square meters is filled with all kinds of Yunnan epics translated into Chinese and no one can translate, even if Borges, Kafka, Tronström and a large group of people come together, it is estimated that no one will walk by them with their heads held high. Unfortunately, this epic museum still exists only in my imagination, and its epic and unquestionable narrative and lyrical methods are still not valued, which is one of the most fatal shortcomings in modern and contemporary Chinese literature.
In Yunnan, people are accustomed to imagining it, but it is actually the hometown of people with disaster backgrounds looking for intimate language. My "Yunnan Chronicle" may just give a prescription to a group of homesick patients, although homecoming has become a shame and nightmare for many people.
fourth:
In the poetry collection "Yunnan Chronicle", you can see your thoughts and criticisms of the destruction of the mountains and rivers in Yunnan, of course, this must be out of the compassion you have developed from walking on this land for a long time, and the reverence for the gods of the mountains and rivers. At present, Yunnan has in fact become the poetic imagination of many people for "far away", but you are a witness to the destruction and degeneration of this "barbaric land" under the influence of the tide of capital, and you have said that you have never opposed modern civilization, and you are against that kind of wounded civilization. I suspect that this memory must have been in the 1990s, when you resigned as secretary of the County Party Committee of Yanjin County and transferred to Kunming's Yunnan Architecture Newspaper as an editor. What kind of memory was that?
thunder:
I was a coward, I had never quit my job in my life, and I was always afraid that if I didn't have a stable work unit, I would starve to death– an illusion that had blinded me all my life. I should resign when I was in the Yanjin County Party Committee, and I should resign when I reported in Zhaotong City, but I have always followed certain procedures and rules in the real world, "transferring" from one unit to another, and letting a psychological sense of security shelter me - even after working in a construction company for thirteen years, I did not have the courage to resign. However, it was precisely because I worked for the largest construction company in Yunnan that I was able to take the company's large truck transporting building materials, the van of the production safety inspection team and the trade union condolence group, to many magical places in Yunnan, and to realize the reality and spiritual world of the "low-level people" represented by construction workers. Yunnan's ancient national culture, the natural wonders of divinity, and the joys and sorrows of the people at the bottom also entered my early poetry or prose creation. That is to say, in the years as a reporter and editor for Yunnan Architecture News, what I saw and heard led to the inevitable branding of my writing as a deep "Yunnan" – my world was full of gypsy migration and dusty construction sites, as well as migrant workers who spoke a variety of different mother tongues, and I was so eager to "record" them that I even began a writing adventure that pursued the intersection of narrative and "eternal news in poetry". Passionate but treading on thin ice, each step is like a slow movement in a tunnel that has just been dug by road construction.
I went to Dominica in the Caribbean once in 2018. In addition to the sea and the cloud mountains on the sea, the terrain, plants, sunlight and the smell of the air made me feel that I had not come to a place after nearly forty hours of air travel, but was in the mountains of southern Yunnan as usual. Brodsky, in his preface to Derek Wolcott's Poems of the Caribbean, says that since civilization is finite, there will be moments in the life of every civilization where the center stops being held together. At these times, the work of maintenance falls on people from the provinces and from the periphery. Contrary to popular belief, the periphery is not where the world ends – but where it spreads out. "The place where the poet came from is the true original Tower of Babel." Similarly, when talking about his poetry writing for the island of Saint Lucia and the Caribbean as a whole, Walcott said, "I'm not inheriting any writing tradition, I'm creating it." When the greatness of Walcott's poetry proves the truth quality of these statements over and over again, there is no longer any need to continue to discuss the regionality of poetry. Yunnan, Hubei, Hunan, Shandong, Shanxi, Guangdong, Guangxi, Hainan, Henan and Hebei are the "Island of Saint Lucia" of other poets, the place where the world spreads out, where new traditions are born, and by no means the shackles of ideas that bind the hands and feet of poets and the wings of poetry.
So, whether as the place where I live or as the name of my poetry collection, as Brodsky put it, it is the "original Tower of Babel", not anything else. As for the intrusion of industrial and commercial civilization, it has happened everywhere, some people have seen it, some people have not seen it, some people have pretended not to see it, some people have seen and felt that this is not the poetic building material he needs, but I have seen and recorded it in the form of poetry, and I cannot confirm my identity as a "witness", and the "testimony" in artistic creation is legally invalid, nor can it be taken as a constituent element of some kind of cultural morality, and when accepting the harsh selection of the aesthetic system, They could all be a pile of text garbage.
fourth:
This statement of yours has undoubtedly given me a better understanding of your creative philosophy. During this period, you have very little creative volume and spend most of your time reading. But after more than a decade of deep understanding of the epicness of Yunnan, you did not continue to devote your energy to poetry creation, but began to write novels. Why did you make that choice? Do you think that the fictional way of fiction is more able to convey or present the profundity of this cognition?
thunder:
At the beginning of 1990, I was transferred from the office of the Yanjin County Party Committee to zhaotong city newspaper as an editor, in mid-1991 I was transferred to the propaganda department of Yunnan No. 9 Construction Engineering Company under Kunming Yunnan Construction Engineering Corporation (later renamed Yunnan Construction Engineering Group, now known as Yunnan Construction Investment Group) as a press officer, and in mid-1993 I was transferred to the head office of Yunnan Construction News as an editor, until 2003 I was transferred to the editorial department of Kunming Wenlian "Dianchi" as an editor (and later transferred to Yunnan Provincial Writers Association in 2011). During this period, I did rarely write anything, in order to survive in Kunming, I also worked part-time in media such as "Everyone" magazine and "Yunnan Information Newspaper", at most including the formal unit, I had four jobs, riding bicycles around the city, site interviews, press release writing, manuscript editing and proofreading, and there was very little free time. Moreover, working part-time in "Everyone" magazine (later seconded to work for nearly three years), because the magazine's founding editor-in-chief Li Wei brainwashed me into success, I once regarded becoming an excellent editor as my ideal, no longer enthusiastic about creation - this dedicated, crazy, cute little old man in Hubei, I met him on Shulin Street the other day, a gray hair, returning from buying vegetables from the market, tilting my head, looking at me with kind eyes, asking me how I was lately. Haha, what can I do? I told him that I was about to retire, and he seemed to have just seen one of my gray hairs, and couldn't help but laugh. Trying to hug him, my hands moved and I held back. When I was first seconded to Everyone magazine, one day he said to me more seriously and more vigorously, there are too many excellent writers in the world, but there are very few people who can find them, don't write, you should be a good editor! The ghost knew what was going on, and I actually accepted his seduction, and then I followed him all over the world, organizing the manuscript, reading the draft, and was very busy. Once, he led me to Wuhan, lived in the internal guest house of a printing house, and proudly edited and published a set of "pocket books", dreaming that this set of books could sweep the Chinese book market and then make a lot of money to make "Everyone" magazine rich. This stay is half a month, every day, Dunton led me to eat hot dry noodles, if it were not for Shen He and other friends from time to time to ask me to eat food, I would have been supported by his hot dry noodles to death. What's worse is that we both live in a room, and in the middle of the night he will get up to take a cold shower, lie down on the bed after washing, put on reading glasses, and start reading. Sometimes, I would pull out a notebook full of the phone numbers of the three generations of old, middle-aged and young writers, and enthusiastically began to ask for manuscripts and talk about manuscripts. He always thought that as soon as he got up, the sky would be light, everyone would get up, but he didn't know that it was the middle of the night, and he often made some writers cry and laugh. I didn't sleep well for half a month, until Shen He told me about the "Panfeng Discussion on the Sword", and I flew to Beijing on the pretext of organizing the manuscripts of both sides of the Sword And escaped from the "Bitter Sea". In those years, I watched him join forces with other magazines to engage in the "Network Quartet" (four magazines launched a writer at the same time), "Zhu Wen Novel Column", "Convex and Concave Text" (cross-genre writing), "Literary Survey" and other hot literary journal columns, and this little old man's body seemed to have a few more motors than others. Later, because of "various reasons", he could not formally transfer me to the editorial department of "Everyone", could not make me an "editor", and as soon as the secondment period arrived, I decided to leave "Everyone" and return to Yunnan Construction Engineering Group to work honestly. Going to say goodbye to him, he was in tears and didn't say a word.
I spent those years like this, and later chose to write novels, also because When Mr. Li Wei advocated the cross-genre writing of "convex and concave text", he felt that maybe only I figured out what he wanted to do, gave me a holiday, and made sure that I wrote a model that reflected his literary ideals behind closed doors (the quality is almost the same, the key is to convey his concept of cross-genre writing), so I wrote works such as "Rural Cases" and tasted the sweetness of narrative from it. Leaving "Everyone", I also wrote several novels through inertia, and they were adopted by several "big publications", which was a bit drifting, thinking that I could also write novels like Wang Anyi, Su Tong, and Ah Lai, plus under the influence of Latin American writers, and Yunnan is not short of magic, if you work hard enough, I believe that I can also find a sense of existence in the narrative kingdom of fiction and restoration. So I put poetry aside, thought about writing novels every day, and nervously climbed towards the literary standards set by novels such as "The Old Man with Giant Wings", "Ancestor Trilogy" and "The Story of The Painter Wang Fu".
fourth:
Why, after two years of persistence, did you resolutely abandon fiction writing and return to poetry?
thunder:
The reason is simple, not to write novels, because speaking and writing are two different things. "Many years later," when I met the novelist Lu Min on a sunny afternoon in Nanjing, she asked me: "Why are the stories you wrote not as wonderful as when you told us?" I was speechless, gray, and didn't speak, feeling in my heart that maybe I was more suitable to be a storyteller. Of course, maybe this is just an excuse for me not to write novels, but the reality is that the complex experience required by a novelist and the ability to live in harmony with any language I am born with, and a whole lot of dirty and physical work such as story advancement, space design, character building, sprinting forward with a mess, dialogue, virtual reality and regulating the rhythm of the story, etc., quickly overwhelmed me - my ideal novel, I can't write, and poetry in some moments, because of a certain sentence, I can put on a crown of inventors for myself. Bad novels don't make good works because a few lines have the qualities of an oracle, poetry can, although sometimes writing a short six-line poem, I spend far more time than writing a novella.
fourth:
I agree with you that maybe you're inherently good at poetry, and personally think that a poem sometimes has no less capacity than a novella. In fact, since the 1990s, with the loss of power in poetry writing and the strengthening of the reality of narrative life in poetry writing, everyday scenes and things can be said to have made poetry fall to the ground from the past and return to the true state of poetry, but the poetry creation techniques that are too narrative sometimes also destroy the texture and depth of poetry that should exist, so that the necessary emotions are covered and abandoned, your "The Process of Killing Dogs", "Questions from Myna", "The Story Told by Literature", "Raising Cats", "Zhaolu Dahe" and other works. Is it undoubtedly a distinct representation of narrative poetry (you seem to call yourself a "narrative poem"), and is this written to show that your "narrative does not point to the possibility of narrative, but to the impossibility of narrative"?
thunder:
Zhang Zhihao once stood on the edge of the Yangtze River and said to me in a serious voice: "I want to be lyrical, but life forces me to narrate." At that time, looking at his long gray beard, his heart softened, forcing himself to nod to him frequently. In fact, I don't agree with him – he has a serious suspicion of pushing his inner responsibility for no longer lyricalism to the narrative amazing "life"! Haha, I suggest "Life" to him for another fourteen days of relentless isolation. Poetry does not come to the narrative scene because the bottomless pit of life has swallowed up the poet and the poet can only write a "complaint" in the cave, but contemporary Chinese poetry needs a lot of magic, including narrative, to try and make mistakes when facing the nebula map of life. I personally feel that in the current context, any single Taoist technique is not enough to present the contradictions and spiritual labyrinths of diversified and extreme life, especially when poetry exploration becomes a poetry breakthrough, active or passive, and any poet may have to consciously add as much difficulty and height as possible to his own writing - is it not just narrative? Even if you add mathematical, astronomical, chemical, physical, theological, and sorcery to your hopeless trial and error process, you may not restore the dignity of poetry and produce a great psalm worthy of the "present." Talking about the blessings of poetry by many elements of tradition, philosophy, and religion is a joke, because we are desperate and urgently need to ascend high and look far or cross the ocean. Speaking of narratives alone, narratives are often treated by the general public as snakes walking on their stomachs, but is there a narrative that can fly like an angel or directly imitate Chang'e flying into the moon? And has an epic-like tone and proposition.
fourth:
In fact, after reading a lot of your poems, you can feel that many of your poems are not narratives, but more lyrical, such as the works "My Hometown Has Been Unrecognizable", "Relatives", "Heart Blossoms", "Mother", "The Aesthetics of Dusk", "Calm", etc. Of course, in the long poem "Ferry", you combine narrative and lyricism so cleverly. I believe that such works also confirm that the essence of poetry is lyricism. How do you understand the "lyricality" of poetry?
thunder:
Completing lyricism through narrative may be one of the yardsticks that test a poet's ability to integrate. In the act of writing that has to be done through narrative, the lyrical share will be reduced as much as possible, but the writer should be clear that narrative or lyricism is not the end or starting point of writing. The so-called "lyricism" in the short volume of poetry that pays attention to rhythm, I think it is an explosion, but in contemporary Chinese poetry, I prefer that it is a fire that does not burn in the middle of the text, a piece of ice that does not melt. The gods and tigers I like, the words and the tone, they will not become me, and I will always be their bystander.
fourth:
I was taught by your knowledge. In fact, in writing about things such as hometown, land and relatives, you have obviously defined the direction of personal poetry writing, and these three occupy the heaviest weight in the source of Chinese cultural heritage and ancient poetry. Ancient poetry has a great influence on the writing of modern and contemporary poetry, and the representatives in my personal vision are Wen Yiduo, Dai Wangshu, Bian Zhilin, Liang Zongdai, Ji Xian, Yu Guangzhong, Luo Fu, Zheng Shuoyu, Chang Yao, Ren Hongyuan, etc. In the face of the glorious achievements of classical Chinese poetry and the long history, the emotions of contemporary poets are certainly complex, and your "Cutting Bamboo" is very impressive to me. Because of the bamboo on the mountain, there seems to be a fairy qi in the breeze, but the word "cutting" shows that the individual is not a fairy-like posture; what seems to be cultivation is actually a mocking self-pleasure, spontaneous and true, so the poem can see the influence of ancient poetry on you. What is your understanding of the influence of ancient poetry?
thunder:
I don't like Han Shanzi's original poems, but I like Han Shanzi's poems that Schneider translated into English and liu Xiangyang into Chinese. In the opening words of this year's Spring Scroll for "Poetry Harvest", I talked about the poems of Master Cang Xue, who is also a poet monk: Cang Xue's poems have been copied a lot before, but this time I was annoyed when I copied them - I found that there were many good sentences but not many good ones, and many poems came to the mountainside but did not reach the top, and the semantics were clear and the poetry was not competed, which made people add a lot of troubles in the process of copying. The poems of the Sincere Yu Treatise are endowed with four clouds: "If the illusion is too much, it is compatible with the class; if the fate is too strong, it is contrary to the matter; if the argument is too reasonable, it is lost with righteousness; if the beauty is too beautiful, it is contrary to love." All four seem to be able to find shadows in his poems. The reason for this, I reckon, is probably related to the fact that his mind is in the empty door and the poet's body is in the human world, and many of the poems are tired of world affairs, trapped by emotions, and tend to preach, and from the point of view, they are not all from the heart, and experience and Zen enlightenment account for a large proportion of the poems. In addition, monks regard poetry as "Qi language", which is a strange trick that is contrary to the Law, and despised in their hearts, most of the monks and poets often do not enter the poem with their fate, which limits the expression boundary of poetry, and the writing that focuses on Zen enlightenment compresses the aesthetic space of poetry. This is true of Cangxue poetry, so is Han Shanzi, and so is a large number of classical poems. Why would I like the cold mountain poem of second-hand goods, because it was added to modernity.
fourth:
Speaking of the word "influence", it is natural to have to say what you mentioned on the phone with you about poets writing more "good poems without impact". Harold Bloom defines "influence" in his book The Anxiety of Influence as a metaphor for a matrix of relationships—image relationships, temporal relationships, spiritual relationships, psychological relationships—that they are inherently self-defensive in nature, and that the anxiety of influence comes from a complex, intense misreading behavior. But this misreading behavior may be a healthy state, and the text will be interpreted by the reader in many directions. Do you also have anxiety about this effect? Wanting to write more "good poems without impact" is to avoid this kind of problem?
thunder:
The psalms in which there is a space for misreading are produced only by the hands of good poets, which are the embodiment of wisdom and the need for aesthetics. Contrary to Harold Bloom' view, I would rejoice if my poems produced "complex, intense misreading behaviors" because it increased the possibilities of poetry. What I mean by "influence" is a kind of secular utilitarian feedback, not the loss of control and suppression brought about by the "anxiety of influence".
fourth:
The reason why I ask this question is actually related to the recent changes in your poetry. Your recently published poems, as well as this group of poems published in this issue of Yangtze River Literature and Art, have obvious changes from the works I have read before, and it can be said that the intention is extremely deep and not traced, and the events are close and distant. Although a good poet or a good novelist can only complete the transformation in the pursuit of change, this change may also be risky. Does this change in your poetry writing mean that you want to make a formal and spiritual revolution in your writing?
thunder:
"Change" in writing is largely an illusion, as it tends to exist only in form and not in the mental space of the writer. The change that people see, I believe, is from a suckling pigeon to a carrier pigeon flying with a copper whistle, not from a carrier pigeon to a crow. In fact, for a serious and systematic writer, "metamorphosis" is difficult to happen, because he is more obsessed with the invariance of direction, unless he finds himself biased or even reversed. My change is not revolutionary, and I have no intention of denying the past, but trying to be closer to my own inner standards in the choice of style and language, and to minimize the proportion of pleasing others- because I lean inward and find what Li Jingze calls a limited "ideal reader".
fourth:
After years of writing poetry, do you consider yourself a poetic innovator? Some of your poems are full of wild charm, how do you understand this?
thunder:
A man on the road to escape the wilderness, deep in the mountains saw a broken temple, and planted grain and vegetables in the surrounding wasteland, and lived for a long time. Over time, the idea of becoming a monk was moved, but the original idols in the temple were all smashed, so he made statues of mud, wood, and stones. In his heart, there are only different images of bodhisattvas, and only he knows which one is who the statue is, with thousands of postures and different looks. He also wanted to make several statues out of brass and gold, and now that a smelting furnace was built, he searched for copper and gold in the mountains behind the ruined temple every day. Let us bless Him!
Opposition. Etiquette is lost in the wilderness. Wild, desolate, and the real earth came out of nowhere, not showing foreign objects, strange interests, and different beauty according to the concepts of the world, and its difference is not different, but the true form of the alienation of the earth to the human being. They produce physical and chemical reactions in people's hearts, perhaps because they are lost and regained, or because a strange world has come to us.
fourth:
A small number of your poems have a quality that is almost colloquial, and it seems that in such works you want to try to create characters to speak for you, of course, this may just be my misreading and speculation. Are they all your own voices? Or that they are part of what you envision as coming from yourself.
thunder:
Spoken language is closest to the truth, and it is also closest to the original meaning of the language - using spoken language can minimize the difficulty of finding a new meaning home for words. But we all have to have a common sense: many spoken languages can only put it into a magical context that suits it, and it will shine and become a "stroke of Genius". That is to say, the use of spoken language is actually based on finding and discovering spoken language, and you have to build a home for them. It's not easy to do – sometimes you have to try to create them, chanting the mantra of "turning stones into gold."
Ding: Novelists and poets may sometimes be powerless in the face of times and reality, so complete freedom of writing is difficult to achieve. How do you think you can better and more effectively integrate personal writing with the times in which you live? Is a poem like your "Past One" an attempt?
thunder:
Placing your desk on the scene of the times is not necessarily the most authentic or effective attitude of the writer, and the "phenomenon" or "event" you see may not really make you "shocked" or "tearful". Many times, the most solemn reality may be the most solemn stage, and its artificial drama is tantamount to fiction. So you have to choose between the fiction of the other and the fiction of your individual—the alienated, the hidden, the fiction that allows reality to enter the literary system may make more sense, even though many things in reality are far more earth-shattering than fiction. I am, I am not - writing reality is not just a matter of "grounding", the important thing is "receiving the weather", and the already allegorical reality may only be presented through mythology. The writing of Ismail Kadalay of Albania is an example of this. Gone are the flat, straight-talking, chapter-style "and listen to the next decomposition" style of writing that repays wrongs. A series of writings that are simply painful, present the evil of mediocrity, cross mountains and mountains only for a reunion, and revolve around the great salvation from beginning to end will slowly enter a vacuum that is difficult to meet the reader's aesthetic demands.
fourth:
So whether it is a novelist or a poet, the way in which reality is presented is a test, as you said in the "preface" of the poetry collection "Kino Mountain", the difficulty of poetry lies in how to turn "reality" into "reality in poetry". In my personal perception, the poetry of the poet Amy hai has a keen sense of history, which is both public and personal. How do you balance the connection between the sense of time and the sense of history in your poems?
thunder:
Amyhai, Milosz, Brodsky, Gilbert, Baxter, and so on, with a background of disaster and asceticism of public significance, we can easily see before them a vague speaker—not privately created by them, but provided for them by time and history—which determines that their regurgitation, witnessing, and observing always have a purpose of enlightenment and enlightenment. Many truths have long been revealed, but they are still in the midst of an expedition to obtain individualized truths, and not to prove anything, but purely a religious fetish, a soul journey that tries to invent or find luminous bodies in their own language. My time depends on a clock in an ice cube, and my history I want it to be a line in memory and a line in the future, starting from where they are and finally converging here with me, so I am passive, accompanying them little by little to rigidity, or little by little moving. For this reason, I feel that I am different from the background of the above big people, I have a captive background like a birdcage bird or an amber worm.
fourth:
The poet's spirit is constantly changing as the experience grows, and different feelings and cognitions will appear, will you revise the previous poetic works?
thunder:
I was a confused worm and never had a sense of literature. Shen He, who has edited several of my poetry collections, knows that every time before publishing a poetry collection, he throws a bunch of poetry manuscripts to him, and he can edit it any way he wants. There is no time to write in the poems, and there is a cubicle between the poems and the poems—and I know very well that far more poems that I throw away and that I forget on a piece of paper than those that are included in the collection of poems. I have written some poems, except for a few that people have repeatedly spoken about and finally let me remember, and many more poems that even I doubt whether they were written by me, like you just said "Past One", I have completely forgotten what it wrote. This is not to show that I have disrespect for what I have written, nor that my writing is completely "felt" and unsystematic, but to answer your questions – I have never modified my previous work, nor do I want to inject current ideas into my past works. It is precisely because of the existence of change, new things are constantly being produced, I need to meet rather than run back, and it is more important to write the current work than to modify the old work. Old works can be considered part of the forgotten. Turn off the lights and let it sleep in the dark room.
fourth:
Yes, each poem may be an "exercise to attain perfection", and what is needed to be completed is the test of time, and the reader will give the final answer. How did you face criticism of your poetry from readers? Will the sound of criticism affect your poetry?
thunder:
Reading critical articles is not as real as the point of view in the voice when you communicate face-to-face. But in the treatment of sincere, scholarly critical articles about me, I always read carefully, many of which have opinions, perspectives, foresights, and "wishes" that I pinned on, all of which are my life-saving straws - the poet is actually a messenger who "performs" crossing or going up the current in the rapids, and the audience stands on both shores and even the third shore, and anyone is constructive to your blessings, curses and alarms.
fourth:
While preparing to interview you, I came across a very interesting story that the French poet Blaise Sandlar said in an interview. In 1917 he completed a poem called "At the Center of the World," which left him amazed himself by its completeness, its modernity, and everything he had put into it, because it was an anti-poetic poem. He put the poem in a box, nailed it, put it in the attic of the country, and decided to publish it ten years later. But thirty years later, he still did not publish, believing that it was not yet time to publish, even if an editor bid a million francs to buy it. My question is, would you have the will to do the same, or do the same?
thunder:
Blythe Sandlar appears in Hemingway's Feast of Flowing, saying that he is a liar, but that "it is more interesting to hear him lie than to hear many people tell true stories." The story you told about the poem "At the Center of the World" is also very interesting, I don't know if it is a lie, I will look up the relevant information and try to read this poem. I "Baidu" once, Confucius old books online has his French version of the collection "Accompany Me to the End of the World", the price tag of 75 yuan, should not be "in the center of the world". Such a thing, in the form of a game, can be tried, if its value means a million francs or a time to deny the promise in order to attract the curiosity of more people, I will not do it. My biggest weakness in writing is that I don't have an entertaining spirit, and it makes me miserable.
However, as mentioned in the previous conversation, I have written quite a few poems that I have forgotten or thrown away, some of which are certainly in my cluttered pile of books, that they are not as important to me as "At the Center of the World" to Bryce Sandlar, and that if I meet them again one day, I will pick some to publish. I will not look for those who have been lost.
fourth:
If you had to answer without thinking, which poem do you think is the most satisfying to you?
Ray: It's a cruel, inhuman question, haha, Borges has also encountered, and the questioner wrote—he bowed his head, pondered for a long time, and answered desperately, if the prose is the Book of Sand, if the poetry is The Autumn Night. I answer you "without hesitation", not the most satisfying, but the most important thing for me is the "Sacrifice of the Father"—perhaps one day in the future, this poem will become the only work I want to revise.
—END—
Yangtze River Literature and Art, No. 5, 2022
Responsible Editor | Ding East Asia
▲ Ding Dongya
▲Lei Pingyang